Time & Perspective Quote by Andrew Gould

There’s a quiet power move baked into Gould’s phrasing: it turns scientific discovery from a romantic story of backyard ingenuity into a pitch for scale. “Whatever was at hand” is doing double duty. On its face, it honors the scrappy era of planet-hunting, when exoplanets were the domain of improvised rigs, repurposed instruments, and a kind of open-door participation where amateurs could still matter. Underneath, it’s a gentle demotion of that culture: not wrong, just outgrown.

The line “It’s time to move on” is the tell. This isn’t awe-struck astronomy talk; it’s stage-direction language, the vocabulary of budgets, roadmaps, and institutional readiness. Gould frames a transition from opportunism to infrastructure. The subtext is: we’ve proven the concept, now fund the dedicated tools. In tech terms, the prototype worked; the product needs investment.

Context matters because exoplanet detection has always been tethered to instrumentation. Each leap in certainty and volume (from wobbly radial-velocity hints to transit catalogs to microlensing surveys) has followed not just better ideas but better hardware. Gould’s quote positions the field at an inflection point: discoveries are no longer the bottleneck; the bottleneck is organized capacity. By invoking “small telescopes” and “even amateur telescopes,” he also cues a cultural shift, from citizen-adjacent exploration to big-science consolidation. The intent is persuasive, almost managerial: keep the romance, but retire the reliance on luck and leftovers.